Ex-Dog Ward finally the guy on top

Of all the debatable calls in this year's Super Bowl, the one that most easily could have been challenged came after the game and had to do with who was going to Disney World.

In the end, it seemed the right guy got the wrong award.

What Hines Ward really should have been named was the MDMVP. Because the former Georgia Bulldog was the Most Deserving Most Valuable Player that could have been chosen.

There really wasn't a standout performance Sunday. Even Ward's best plays were mostly the result of somebody else's savvy - Ben Roethlisberger's deft improvisation that set up a 37-yard pass play and the touchdown throw off an end around that Atwaan Randle El put in the perfect spot.

Not that Ward didn't do more than anybody in a game when nobody did much of anything.

He had the same number of yards receiving that his quarterback had passing and was involved in two of the game's biggest shifts, setting up one touchdown and scoring another.

Somebody who is at the center of a Super Bowl's defining moments usually deserves MVP consideration. And nobody deserved something like that to happen to him when he finally reached the biggest game of the year any more than Ward, who had spent more than a decade leading up to Sunday in some sort of football purgatory.

Twice in the previous four years, more than half of his pro career to that point, his team came up one game short of the Super Bowl. Last year it was even a big story that he cried after the AFC title game, thinking Pittsburgh's loss then took away teammate Jerome Bettis' last chance to win a championship.

And even though Ward's good-guy image took a hit when he held out before this season, he came back and played the way he always does, working harder and more effectively than most players in the league.

That said something about who he is. But not nearly as much as what people around here had already seen a long time ago.

At Georgia, Ward was always somebody who gave more to his program than he got back from it.

He arrived there before the football renaissance began and left before it bloomed. But from 1994 through '98, he was an exceptional player on some pretty average teams, a Mr. Everything for a team that was anything but the power it is today.

He was the best runner, receiver, kick returner and sometimes even passer on teams that won half of their games in his first three seasons. And he was the best reason the turnaround of UGA football began with a 10-2 record when he was a senior.

In fact, on some Saturdays in those seasons that ended far from the SEC championships Georgia has been collecting lately, a lot of people went to Sanford Stadium just to see what Ward would do that week.

Yet, throughout such a bittersweet college career, that smile of his was as familiar a site in Athens as it was on Ford Field Sunday night, when Ward got the highest praise in the biggest game of the season.

Nobody would have predicted that when he went to the pros as a third-round pick without great speed or a clear-cut position eight years ago. But now that player who was supposed to be too slow for the NFL is the all-time leading receiver for a franchise that has already placed two of them in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

Sunday night, after a football life spent with somebody else winning the big game, Ward was the guy on top.

And while he might not have had the best game ever by a Super Bowl MVP, he was the best guy the award could have gone to this time.